Imaginative geographies in the popular media The significance of the popular media to geography...

Imaginative geographies in the popular media

The significance of the popular media to geography

Imaginative geographies and the dramatisation of geographical objects: some basic arguments

The media and imaginative geographies of spatiality

Mediated senses of place

The significance of the media to geography

Major element in contemporary everyday life

- 99% of households in UK have at least one television

- 98% of US households have a TV, and average no. of TVs per household = 2.3

- over 80% of UK households owned or rented a video

- the average adult viewing time = 25 hours per week in 1988

- the average child viewing time = 18 hours per week in 1988

- over 10 million people purchased a daily newspaper in 1988(Figures from Phillips and Mighall, 2000; Burgess, 1990)


The media is "saturated with geographical messages and

meanings" (Burgess, 1990)



The media is "saturated with geographical messages and

meanings" (Burgess, 1990)"Consider , for example, the coverage in the press and television of issues relating to environmental pollution, water quality, natural disasters, nature conservation, development pressures on the countryside, the design of cities, green politics and long term climatic change. Think of the extent to which advertisement use particular landscapes to sell their products or the rise and manipulation of people's desire to purchase 'environmentally friendly ' goods. Reflect on the kinds of settings used in the film and television drama to lend realism to the fictions of their narratives" (Burgess, 1990, p. 141).



The media is full of imaginative geographies, and may be the most significant mechanism creating these geographies

John Thompson (1994) argues that there has emerged in the modern world a 'mediated worldliness':

'our sense of the world that lies beyond the sphere of personal experience, and our sense of our place within this world, are increasingly shaped by mediated symbolic forms' (Thompson, 1994, p. 34).

The media is a key agent geographical 'dramatisation'

Imaginative geographies and the dramatisation of geographical objects

The content of the study of 'imaginative geographies' is determined by your (and other peoples) 'geographical imagination'

I.e. determined by decisions over what is 'geography' and what is a 'geographical object of study'

At least three geographical objects which might usefully be taken as delimiters of imaginative geography

Spatiality

Places

People and environment


Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between 'striated' and 'smooth' space

Striated space = bounded space Smooth space = directionless variation and effortless movement

Distinction not clear-cut but does highlight 2 possible connections between the media and spatiality The 'media' may be key agent in changing social experience of space

The 'media' may be key agent in representing 'smooth ' space

Changing experiences of space

Is space becoming 'smoother'?

Movements across space have increased in length and speed (time-space compression; globalisation; culture as media of information transmission)

Movements may be increasing in frequency - looking at things from mobile positions

see Wilson (1992) and Cresswell (1993) on the 'the view from the road'

Boundaries to cultural movement may becoming less significant - globalising culture

– Soja (1986) argues that Los Angeles has become 'fully global' in that its image, and thereby its influence, 'is everywhere'

Any one place may have may places present within it

Smooth space = 'hyperspace'


Representations of smooth space

Television, cinema and computer graphics can move viewers instantaneously through space

Inter-cutting of scenes

'Fly-by' shots and simulations

Multi-directional movements

Pastiche and montage


Geographers have suggested that places becoming 'encoded' with meaning

Shields (1991):

'Social spatialisations' = the imaginative geographies of 'sites', 'zones' or 'places' which are encoded with, and frequently used to allude to, social differences

Geographicalspaces

Culturalencoding ofplaces

Metaphoricaluse of sensesof place

Values, events,emotions


Shields distinguishes between:» 'Core images' - widely circulated and commonly held views

» 'Peripheral images' - more varied, more individualistic, more transitory

Place images combined 'core' and 'peripheral' images

Short (1991) distinguishes between:» Myths: "(re)-presentations of reality which resonate across space and

over time, which are widely used and reproduced, which are broad enough to encompass diverse experiences yet deep enough to anchor these experiences in a continuous medium of meaning" (Short, 1991, p. xvi)

» Ideologies: nationally specific representations of reality


Rural and urban space

Widely used 'social spatialisations'

Short (1991) identifies three widely held place myths: » 'wilderness'

» 'country'

» 'city'

Each myth contains opposing but widely held codings

» Wilderness as a place to fear or revere

» Countryside as a 'pastoral idyll' (place of nature /community) or an 'antipastoral view' (place of poverty/backwardness)

» Pro-urban and anti-urban


Countryside documentaries and the rural idyll

Martin Young studied documentary films produced for Granada Television in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Interviewed the film-makers and examined the visual and audio techniques of film production

'Core image' of the documentaries was a "nostaligic, pastoral, arcadian vision of the English landscape"

Suggests that the images and sound tracks created impression of an 'English countryside' inhabited by 'local craftsmen' and made up of beautiful, peaceful and unchanging landscape

Impression created through using 'chains of signification' running from the 'denotative' (the visual/aural signal) to the 'connotative' (the meaningful)

The audio-visual signals of localness in a Granada documentary

Initial shot: "an elderly man over looking Swaledale". Man has a 'weather beaten face and a strong accent'.

Connotations viewer asked to draw: this man is a local

Second shot: Go to 'Bill-up steps' and following conversation heard:

DAVID WRIGHT: 'Seen a few changes then?'

BILL: 'Oh aye, by gum aye. Dale folk was full 'folk, good folk. We're getting a lot of Incomers now. some of 'ems alright and some of 'ems now't; Foreigners'"

Cut to shot of 'hikers'

Connotations viewer asked to draw:

Things have changed here (and not for the better: the viewer should be nostaligic for a lost world).

The hikers are the foreigners and there is a conflict between local and hikers:

Further audio-visual signals of nostalgia

"Bill .... stands at the top of his steps in an ancient collarless shirt and braces. From here we travel to men building a dry-stone wall ...... We return to Swaledale, the old man talks of the hay crop and we cut to people racking hay. A tractor appears, but this quickly goes out of our view as a close-up begins of an elderly women hay-making .. On then to a churchyard, where another elderly man, replete with cloth cap, is shown scything" (Youngs, 1985, p. 156-7).

Denotative focus is on "on bygone skills" (Youngs, 1985, p. 156). People in the countryside documentary are portrayed as 'craftsmen'.

Connotations viewer asked to draw: 'craftsmen embody skills and freedoms are in danger of being lost in a modern industrial society'

The encoding of the rural landscape

Suggests encoding produces a 'petrified', 'idealised' and 'universalised' image of the countryside

Petrified = unchangeable countryside» Created through presentation of "images of a slow moving, little changed and largely upland

agriculture" which appears as " a picture of streams and hills, lanes and farmyards and picturesque stone walls" .

Idealised = a blissful countryside where everybody would wish to live

» People express satisfaction with area

» The sun is always shining!

Universalised in that places in the countryside are described as 'typical rural villages', or as a 'characteristic' market towns

The encoding of the rural landscape

Denotative Connotative

Craftmen

Slow pace

HistoricPetrified landscape

Upland

Happy pop

Sunny Idealised landscape

Universalised landscapeTypical

Nostalgicromance

Localised

Chain of significance

Semiotic analysis

Youngs adopts a 'semiotic' or 'semiological' approach

Semiology = 'a science which would study the life of signs within society' (de Saussure)

Link to linguistic structuralism and post-structuralist claims that language does not simply reflect reality

Conventional view (Post-)Structuralist view

Word 1 Word 2 Word 3 Word 1 Word 2 Word 3

Object 1 Object 2 Object 3 Objects

Semiotic analysis

Range of different semiological analysis associated with people such as de Saussure, Barthes, Eco and others

Often make use of a distinction between signs, signifier and the signified

Signifier Signified

Sign

Connects to denotative/connotative distinction

Signs work in chains of association


Signifier Signified

Sign

Mediated senses of place:The encoding of the inner city

Notion of media encoding of 'core' place images/myths also evident by Burgess (1985)

Argues that newspaper reports apply the social category 'riot' to a wide range of social disturbances

Argues that they also drew on, and thereby perpetuated, 'the myth of the inner city'

Identifies 4 'core codings' of the inner city:

»A landscape of 'derelict terraces and rundown tatty streets'

»A place of white and working class culture

»A place of race conflict

»A place of 'street culture'

The use of the 4 myths of the inner city: an example

Pre-riot report in the Daily Mail:

"Four grainy black and white pictures, one an inset showing a bloodied policeman, the others showing different views of derelict Toxteth. The vandalised, burnt-out car carries reminders of riot photographs; the men sitting on the ledge of a boarded up, crumbling mansion convey ideas of what Toxteth once was before the collapse of 'civilised life'; the 'posed picture with the two little girls is a romanticised comment on racial harmony" (Burgess, 1985, p. 208).

The use of the 4 myths of the inner city: an example

Denotative

Inner city

Riots

Dereliction

Working class

Race conflict

Street culture

B & W Photographs

Vandalised cars

Injured policeman

Men on ledge

Posed girls

Inauthentic harmony

Signifier Signified Signifier Signified=(Denotation) (Connotation) (Myth (Sign))

Connotative

Decoding 'Blade Runner': the questions

1. What sense or senses of 'spatality' are present in the film, and what techniques are used to construct them?

2. What connotations are attached to the denotation(s) of spatiality?

3. What is the role of 'the Orient' in the film?

4. Do you agree with the claim that the film acts 'as a key dystopia of our time'.

5. To what extent does the film's opening sequence draw on the 4 elements of the 'inner city myth' as outlined by Burgess.

6. How does the film subvert established 'geographical myths'

Does the film's opening sequence draw on the 4 elements of the 'inner city myth' as outlined by Burgess?

Decoding 'Blade Runner'

Urban dystopia

Polluted landscape

The urban future

Race conflict

Oriental mercantilism

Street culture

Corporate city

=Signifier Signified Signifier Signified

(Denotation) (Connotation) (Myth (Sign))


Flames

Huge Buildings

Chinese food/people

Purge control

Los Angeles 2019


6. How does the film subvert established 'geographical myths'? Blurs human/nature/machine divide Represents new experiences of spatialities:

"Blade Runner is, in many ways the quintessential city film: it represents urbanism as lived heterogeneity, an ambiguous environment of fluid spaces and identities" (Bukatman, 1997, p. 12)

"Blade-Runner explores ... the postmodern condition ... of flexible accumulation and time-space compression ... with all the imaginary power that the cinema can command" (Harvey, 1989, p. 313)


6. How does the film subvert established 'geographical myths'? Blurs human/nature/machine divide Represents new experiences of spatialities:

Blurs relationship between image and reality

Human simulation (the replicant as (or more) real than real)

Spatial simulation

'Cinematic movement becomes an essential mode of comprehension: the camera often takes on a subject, first-person point of view … Blade Runner … build[s] worlds' (Bukatman, 1997, p. 9)

Travel movies: some initial remarks

Cresswell (1991) claims that travel is of major importance to American culture

Two major themes :» disillusionment with places

» the joy and power of mobility

Suggests themes are 'counter-hegemonic' to 'hegemonic culture' "ensconced in the family/small town/home ownership nexus of the American dream"

Travel became a signifier of power

Travel imagery a 'duplicitous'/'hybrid' image

Decoding Thelma and Louise

1. What is the social codings of spatiality at the beginning of the movie?

2. What signifiers are given to suggest this spatiality?

3. What signifiers are given to suggest change from this spatiality?

4. On which of the myths of travel does the film draw (escape from place or love of travel)?

5. Discuss how the changing physical landscape is used as a signifier in the film

6. Draw a chain of significance chart detailing how the film is both 'counter-hegemonic' and 'hegemonic'


Denoted elements

Geographical connotations

Social connotations

Constraining striated spaces of the home/workplace

Emancipatory smooth space of 'the road'

Patriarchy

Feminine power

What are key denotative elements ?

What is hegemonic and counter-hegemonic?

Patriarchal/striated space = hegemonic

Feminine power/smooth space = counter-hegemonic


Denoted elements

Geographical connotations

Social connotations

Constraining striated spaces of the home/workplace

Emancipatory smooth space of 'the road'

Patriarchy

Feminine power

Relationship to other road movies and other movies: Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, Paris Texas, Natural Born Killers

Hegemonic/striated space = capitalist/familial

Counter-hegemonic = men taking to smooth space

Thelma & Louise as counter-counter-hegemonic?


Considerable debate amongst feminists about the film:

Representation of female emancipation and empowerment?

Betrayal of feminism?

–Successful women emulate men

Masculinist film?"a savvy male director used the buddy movie genre to please the males in the audience by having attractive actresses accentuate their sexiness with their gun-wilding, fast-driving shenanigans, and simultaneously pacify the female viewers as their characters shoot male chauvinist characters" (Roberts, 1997, p. 63)

A white feminist/masculinist film?

Counter-hegemonic travel movies

Followed by range of other 'counter-counter-hegemonic' travel movies

Masculinity/heterosexualityMy Private Idaho

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

Ability/disabilityRainman

Imaginative geography of the mass media: some concluding remarks

Are imaginative geographies central to mass media products?

If so, what 'imaginative geographies' can be 'decoded'?» Place» People/nature relations» Space» Movements through space

Relationship between imaginative geographies and social identities» Imaginative geographies as 'socio-spatialisations' (socio-environmentalisms, social-

landscapes)

Has study of imaginative geographies been symbolic or critical?

Imaginative geography of the mass media: some concluding remarks

Critical dimensions of imaginative geography might include:

Incorporation of notions of hegemony/counter-hegemony and ideology

Recognition of a 'political economy' of the media

"Movies in America are, above all else, a commercial enterprise. Companies make them to make money. This is the major constant of the movie industry. However, .... [w]e cannot read off the subject of the movies from the profit motive. It is always there like the keel of the ship but it is not the rudder. The dynamic of the industry is the work of creative people to meet the demands of a fickle audience" (Short, 1991, p. 179-80).

Also need for audience research to:

Explore the convergence and divergence of meanings

Explore how producers perceptions/expectations of audiences impacts the creation of cultural texts

Imaginative geographies in the popular media The significance of the popular media to geography...

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